(071613)

We're Not in Kansas Anymore

Anna Harvey, a bright,
straight-A sophomore in Lawrence, Kansas, raised her hand in biology class one
day in early 1999. "Mr. Roth, when are we going to learn about creationism?"

Stan Roth exploded. "When
are you going to stop believing that crap your parents teach you?" Anna was
stunned, and within five months Roth was removed from the classroom. Some say
the irascible high-school teacher was about to be fired anyway; others wonder
if it was mere coincidence that, three months after he was forced to retire,
the Kansas Board of Education voted 6ñ4 to de-emphasize the speculative
aspects of evolutiona move that sparked a national debate.

Other states reacted
swiftly. In Kentucky, education officials replaced the word evolution,
which had been added to the guidelines for the first time last spring, with
an earlier locution: change over time. The New Mexico Board of Education
went the other way, revoking 1996 standards requiring teachers to "present the
evidence for and against" evolution, and reverting to a one-sided presentation.
Oklahomaís State Textbook Committee inserted a disclaimer into science
books stating that evolution is controversial (identical to a disclaimer in
Alabama textbooks)a decision later struck down by the attorney general. Kanawha
County, West Virginia, voted down a resolution permitting teachers to present
"theories for and against the theories of evolution." Similar brushfires continue
burning in other states. Small wonder that the Associated Press voted the Kansas
controversy the top story of 1999.

Oddly, similar controversies
had erupted in several other places not long beforeCalifornia, Colorado, Idaho,
Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington. Yet these rarely appeared
in the national media. Why was Kansas different? Why did scathing editorials
appear in big-city newspapers across the country, and even overseas? Why did
national organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) target Kansas?

The answer is that the
debate has escalated to new levels on both sides, and Kansas was a microcosm
of those counterforces at work. A closer examination of the Kansas controversy
gives a good picture of the debate as it stands today.

Hubbub in the Heartland

Consider, for example,
the way events began. Overheated headlines suggest it all started when Bible-thumping
creationists tried to "foist [their] own religious beliefs on the secular educational
system of an entire state" (to quote syndicated columnist LarsñErik Nelson).
But in fact, the initiative came from the other side.

Events began in 1995,
when the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued national standards calling
for "dramatic changes" in the way public schools teach science. The Kansas Commissioner
of Education and the Board of Education appointed a committee to bring state
guidelines into conformity with the standards, as many other states had already
done. The new guidelines greatly increased classroom coverage of evolution,
even elevating it from a theory to a "Unifying Concept" of science (along with
such things as "measurement" and "evidence").

That was too much for
some members of the state board of education. They were willing to increase
the teaching of microevolutiontestable, observable variations caused by adaptation,
natural selection, and genetic drift. But macroevolutionthe "particles-to-people"
varietythey regarded as speculative. The board voted to remove macroevolution
from state tests, giving local school districts the freedom to set their own
standards for teaching the subject.

In short, the board did
not forbid the teaching of anything. On the contrary, it actually increased
coverage of topics related to evolution, though it did not go as far as the
scientific establishment wished. For that minor act of intellectual independence,
board members were castigated mercilessly. A Washington Post article
called them "pinheads," certain to be "eliminated through natural selection."
In the London Evening Standard, A. N. Wilson fumed about the "stupidity
and insularity" of Americaís heartland. Science published a letter
proposing that universities refuse to accept credits from Kansas high school
biology courses. John Rennie, editor in chief of Scientific American,
urged college admissions officials to "make it clear that . . . the qualifications
of any students applying from that state in the future will have to be considered
very carefully." In other words, punish parents by excluding their children.

Three national groups
(the AAAS, the NAS, and the National Science Teachers Association) revoked permission
to use copyright materials, forcing the board to tinker with the standardsí
wording to avoid copyright infringements. On the cultural front, the Missouri
Repertory Theater in Kansas City swiftly revised its schedule to run Inherit
the Wind, the famous play that continues to shape the way most Americans
view the creation-evolution controversy.

Revolution by Design

But this time, reality
did not follow the script. To be sure, initial resistance came from young-earth
creationists. (This movement has been much maligned, even by fellow Christians;
yet it has helped preserve a large pocket of resistance to naturalistic evolution.)
Followup, however, came largely from proponents of intelligent design (ID) a
newer movement that is making surprisingly deep inroads into mainstream culture.

The unofficial spokesman
for ID is Phillip E. Johnson, a Berkeley law professor who converted to Christianity
in his late 30s, then turned his sharp lawyerís eyes on the theory of
evolution. Spotting what he saw as logical errors in the case for Darwinism,
Johnson penned several influential books, including Darwin on Trial and
Reason in the Balance. (His latest book, The Wedge of Truth, is
due out in July.) Johnsonís penetrating critiques were the first to win
a respectful hearing in academia, and he now advises a group of scientists who
are developing the case for design, many of them at the Discovery Instituteís
Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC) in Seattle. After the Kansas
decision, CRSC scholars appeared widely in mainstream media: Johnson in The
Wall Street Journal; director Steve Meyer on NPR; program director Jay Richards
in The Washington Post; and fellows Michael Behe in The New York Times
and Jonathan Wells on PBS.

Indeed, the growing success
of the intelligent-design movement is almost certainly what provoked the over-the-top
reactions to Kansas in the first place. Top university presses are publishing
books on ID, notably William Dembskiís The Design Inference by
Cambridge University Press (1998) and Paul Nelsonís forthcoming On
Common Descent through the University of Chicago Press. Baylor Universityís
Michael Polanyi Center, founded by Dembski, held a conference last month on
naturalism in science that attracted nationally known scientists such as Alan
Guth, John Searle, and Nobel Prize-winner Steven Weinberg. These scientistsí
willingness even to address such questions, alongside design proponents such
as Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, gives enormous credibility to the
ID movement.

Why is ID so successful?
The answer is partly that ID functions as an umbrella uniting various strategies
for relating faith and science. In the past, Christians tended to splinter into
small, often antagonistic groups, such as theistic evolutionists, progressive
creationists, old-earth creationists, young-earth creationists, and flood geologists.
"On this issue the Christian world was playing defense," Johnson explains. "We
were saying, What can we defend? How much do we have to give up?
"

The drawback in playing
defense is that you have to protect each outpost to ensure that the enemy doesnít
get past a single one. Hence Christians argued vociferously about the details
of fossils, mutations, radiometric dating, and the early chapters of Genesis.

By contrast, Johnson
says, ID is about playing offense: "Weíre leaving the fortress and heading
behind the lines to blow up the other sideís headquarters, its ammunition
store." As the dust settles, even the questions Christians are trying to answer
may take on entirely new forms.

What is the other
sideís "ammunition store"? Itís the definition of science itself,
Johnson says. Science is typically defined as objective investigation (discovering
and testing facts)the means for making faster airplanes and better medicines.

But thereís another
definition held implicitly in the scientific establishment, and it is tantamount
to the philosophy of materialism or naturalism. This is the idea that science
may legitimately employ only natural causes in explaining everything we observe.

The way this definition
of science operates is to outlaw any questioning of naturalistic evolution.
Darwinists donít ask whether life evolved from a sea of chemicals;
they only ask how it evolved. They donít ask whether complex
life forms evolved from simpler forms; they only ask how it happened.
The presupposition is that natural forces alone must (and therefore can) account
for the development of all life on earth; the only task left is to work out
the details.

Harvard biologist Richard
Lewontin gave the game away in a revealing article in The New York Review
of Books (January 9, 1997). While expressing skepticism about the "unsubstantiated
just-so stories" often labeled science, Lewontin nevertheless accepts the standard
story of evolution. Why? Because, he writes, "we have a prior commitment, a
commitment to materialism." This commitment is not itself based on science,
Lewontin admits. Indeed, just the opposite: Scientists accept materialism first,
and then are "forced" to define science in such a way that it cranks out strictly
materialistic theories. (In his words, "we are forced by our a priori adherence
to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts
that produce material explanations.") Finally, Lewontin insists that this "materialism
is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door." As Nelson comments,
"Design is ruled out not because it has been shown to be false but because science
itself has been defined as applied materialistic philosophy."

One goal of the ID movement
is to drive a wedge between the two operative definitions of science. The Kansas
board made its own contribution to the "wedge strategy" when it changed the
standardsí definition of science from an activity that seeks "natural
explanations" to one that seeks "logical explanations." The idea is that science
should be open to any rational, testable theory, and not be limited to naturalistic
theories. Design theorists hope to press the case against Darwinism until scientists
are forced to decide which is the real definition of science: Will they
follow the evidence wherever it leads, or will they insist on naturalistic theories
regardless of the evidence?

Holes in the Theory

Of course, the scientific
establishment insists there is no evidence against Darwinism. But the
truth is that the central assumption of Darwinismthat minor changes accumulate
to create major changes between organismshas been disputed for decades. It
has long been known that minor variations, like the differences between dog
breeds, do not add up in any consistent direction. And if theyíre not
going anywhere in the first place, they wonít lead to major evolutionary
innovations, no matter how vast the allotted time.

Take an example that
impressed Darwin: the variation in beak size among finches on the Galapagos
Islands. A recent study found that during a drought, the larger birds survived
better and thus the average beak size increased slightly. Evolution in action?
Not exactly. When the rains came back, beak sizes returned to normal. All that
researchers discovered was a cyclical variation that allows finches to survive
under changing conditions. They found no evidence of novel structures arising.
Yet in a serious distortion of the evidence, a 1998 NAS booklet (Teaching
About Evolution and the Nature of Science) describes the increase in beak
size without mentioning the return to normal size.

It then encourages teachers
to speculate what would happen in 200 years if the increase continued indefinitelywhether
"a new species of finch might arise." As Johnson comments in The Wall Street
Journal (August 16, 1999), "When our leading scientists have to resort to
the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they
are in trouble."

The problems with Darwinism
are so well known that, as long ago as 1980, the news had even hit the popular
press: Newsweek reported on a macroevolution conference at Chicagoís
Field Museum of Natural History, where paleontologists announced that the fossil
record fails to confirm the gradual, continuous change Darwin predicted. Instead,
the overall pattern in the rockswhat Harvardís Stephen Jay Gould has
called "the trade secret of paleontology"consists of sudden appearances of
new life forms, with no transitional forms leading to them, followed by long
periods of stability.

As a result, today biologists
are searching for some unknown, new mechanism capable of generating sudden,
large-scale, systemic changes. Yet strangely, when leading scientists are challenged,
as in the Kansas decision, they respond as though they had never heard of the
macroevolution controversy. They fall back on a verbal equivocation, using the
term evolution to mean both minor, limited variation and the emergence
of novel structuresas though the former were the engine driving the latter.

"Every time a farmer
sprays pyrethroids and cotton moths go right on eating his cotton, that farmer
is confronting evolution in action," Jonathan Weiner wrote in The Philadelphia
Inquirer. Donít those Kansas farmers understand? he fumed. The answer
is, of course they do. They simply donít think minor variations, like
insecticide resistance, produced cotton moths in the first place.

Newer evidence against
Darwinism is emerging as well. In paleontology, the Cambrian explosion has long
posed problems, revealing that all the major body plans for animals appeared
in the fossil record at the same timea pattern inconsistent with Darwinian
gradualism.

Even more devastating,
recent findings turn the tree of life on its head: Instead of minor variations
adding up to produce major categories of organisms, the major categories appear
first, then break up into varieties. Contrary to Darwinís prediction,
says biologist Paul Chien of the University of San Francisco, "the development
of living things is not from the bottom up but from the top down."

Meanwhile, molecular
biology reveals that the living cell is far more complex than Darwin ever dreamed.
It is akin to a miniature factory, filled with molecular machines that act as
motors, pumps, springs, and clocks. "Some are ëtrucksí that carry
supplies from one compartment to another within the cell," explains Behe, author
of Darwinís Black Box. "Loading machines fill up the trucks and
attach an ëaddress label,í and when they reach the right ëaddress,í
docking machines open the trucks and remove the supplies." Such complex systems
cannot arise in the gradual, piece-by-piece process required by Darwinism, Behe
argues, because all the coordinated pieces must be in place before they function
at all.

In addition, the rise
of information theory casts new light on the origin of life. In The Mystery
of Lifeís Origin, Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley, and Roger Olsen
argue that DNA has the same structure as a language, and hence the origin of
life must be recast as the origin of biological information. Yet information
is not created by material forces, any more than the words on this page are
created by molecular forces in the paper and ink.

Equally damaging for
Darwinism are reversals in key evidencelike the case of the peppered moths
in England. According to the standard textbook treatment, when tree trunks were
darkened by soot during the Industrial Revolution, a light-colored variety of
the moth became easier for birds to see and were eaten, while a darker variety
flourished. This has long been touted as a showcase example of natural selection.
But, as Wells demonstrated in The Scientist (May 24, 1999), the moths
donít actually perch on trunks (they fly about in the upper branches),
and those widely published photographs of the moths were all staged. Biologist
Theodore Sargent of the University of Massachusetts recently admitted that,
for the filming of a NOVA documentary, he glued dead moths onto the trees.

Nor is this an isolated
incident. "Itís typical of the way key evidence is distorted to make
the case for Darwinism look stronger," says Wells.

In American Biology
Teacher (May 1999) Wells debunks the familiar drawing of embryos laid out
side by sidefish, amphibian, bird, and mammalallegedly supporting common
ancestry. This drawing appears in many biology textbooks, yet it has been known
for nearly a century that the figures were fudgedlengthened here, shortened
thereto appear more similar than they really are.

Detecting Design

Yet exposing problems
with Darwinism is not enough; one must also propose an alternative, which has
proved much harder. A turning point came in the work of Charles Thaxton, who
studied under Francis Schaeffer at LíAbri in Switzerland and then did
postdoctoral work at Harvard in the 1970s. Studying scientists of earlier centuries,
Thaxton noted that they spoke of "natural causes" and "intelligent causes,"
and he reasoned that there should be a way to distinguish between the twoa
way to identify empirically the effects of intelligence.

In The Mystery of
Lifeís Origin, Thaxton identified the mark of intelligent design
as "specified complexity"a complex structure that fits a preconceived pattern.
William Dembskiís Intelligent Design explains the concept in greater
detail.

"My father was a teacher,
and he used to tell a story to illustrate design," Dembski says. "The best student
and the worst student sit beside each other during a major exam, and when the
teacher grades their papers, he finds that both gave exactly the same answers.
Now, who thinks this happened by chance?" (The punch line: on the last question,
the best student wrote, "I donít understand this question" and the worst
student wrote, "I donít understand it either"thus confirming the design
hypothesis.)

Not only teachers, but
also many other professionals have devised means for detecting design, Dembski
points out. Scientists look for telltale signs that an experiment was rigged,
that the data were "cooked." Detectives are trained to distinguish between murder
and death by natural causes. Insurance companies regularly distinguish between
arson and accidental fires. The claim of ID theory is that design can be detected
in nature as well.

In one sense, this is
something everyone admits. Evidence for design shows up in laboratories all
the time. "What we do in molecular biology is in effect reverse engineering,"
explains ID proponent Scott Minnich of the University of Idaho. "We examine
complex structures in the cell and try to figure out the blueprints." Even Darwin
did not deny the evidence for design; instead, he hoped to show that living
things only appear designed, while really being the result of chance
and natural selection. In the words of Francisco Ayala of the University of
California, Darwinís goal was to "exclude God as the explanation accounting
for the obvious design of organisms." Thus arch-Darwinian Richard Dawkins, in
The Blind Watchmaker, defines biology itself as "the study of complicated
things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." In short,
design is "obvious"; the question is only whether it is real or apparent.

What makes the question
so compelling today is that design is no longer found only in living things
but also in the physical universe itself. In cosmology, the so-called anthropic
principle tells us the universe itself is finely tuned to support life. "Imagine
a universe-creating machine," says Meyer, "with thousands of dials representing
the gravitational constant, the charge on the electron, the mass of the proton,
and so on. Each dial has many possible settings, and what you discover is that
even the slightest change would make a universe where life was impossible."
Yet, strangely, each dial is set to the exact value needed to keep the universe
running. Astronomer Fred Hoyle, though an atheist, states the implications bluntly:
"A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has
monkeyed with the physics."

ID's Big Tent

Who is that "superintellect"?
Is intelligence merely a code word for God? So critics charge. But Thaxtonís
innovative insight was that "intelligent cause" is a generic category for talking
about any intelligence, whether human or divine or some undefined mind in nature,
thus providing a way to talk about design without making any theological presuppositions.
"One can empirically detect the products of an intelligent agent without specifying
who that agent is," Thaxton explains.

Thus the ID movement
has become a "big tent," attracting people from a variety of religious backgrounds.
CRSC fellow David Berlinski, who has published Commentary articles critical
of Darwinism, is Jewish. In Kansas, board supporters included local Muslims
and a group of Hare Krishnas, who showed up at a meeting wearing saffron robes.

Even agnostics who believe
the universe is in some sense teleological have teamed up with the ID movementfigures
like Michael Denton, author of the influential Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.
His most recent book, Natureís Destiny, argues that purpose pervades
the universe at all levels.

"The power of ID is precisely
its minimalism," says Todd Moody, an agnostic and professor at St. Josephís
University in Philadelphia. "It travels light, with no theological baggage."

Among Christians, ID
shows promise of uniting often hostile factions, from young-earth creationists
to theistic evolutionists and everyone in between. Paul Ackerman of Wichita
State University, who helped craft the Kansas standards, is a young-earth creationist
who says ID has "helped create a broad umbrella."

Though Christians continue
to debate among themselves on issues like the age of the earth, when facing
the secular world "weíre putting aside our differences," Ackerman says.
"We realize that what unites us is greater than what divides us."

Even some theistic evolutionists,
who have been among the ID movementís most vocal critics, are lining
up behind its critique of naturalism. Denis Lamoureux of St. Josephís
College in Canada has taken aim at Johnson and other design theorists many times.

Yet he told Christianity
Today, "Iím a flaming design theorist." Like the Romantic biologists
of the 18th century, Lamoureux draws an analogy between the evolution of species
and the development of an embryo, regarding both as teleological processesthe
unfolding of an inbuilt potential.

Similarly, Howard Van
Till, professor emeritus at Calvin College, has often debated ID proponents
publicly. Yet his own view is that the universe is "intentionally gifted" by
God with the capacity for bringing about new forms from simpler units, so that
design is frontloaded into the initial conditions. All Lamoureux and Van Till
need to do is give empirical content to the notion of frontloaded design, and
they would fall into the design camp. As it is, on empirical questions their
position remains identical to naturalistic evolution, while conceptually it
bears no relation to the materialistic version of evolution held by the scientific
establishment. ID is incompatible only with forms of theistic evolution that
adopt methodological naturalism, the principle that in science one may invoke
only undirected, unguided natural causes.

The God Question

Clearly, while ID does
not require any theological presuppositions, it has theological implications:
It is resolutely opposed to the atheistic, purposeless, chance view of evolution
taught in the power centers of science. This suggests a final theme emerging
from the Kansas controversythe refusal by so many to acknowledge that religion
is genuinely at stake in this issue. Pervasive through the editorials and columns
was the argument that the folks in Kansas were mistaken to see mainstream evolutionism
as posing any contradiction to religion. The underlying assumption is that science
is a matter of facts and reason, while religion is a matter of faithand never
the twain shall meet. This commonly held idea was summarized in a 1981 NAS resolution:
"Religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought
whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstandings of both scientific
theory and religious belief."

Yet this pose of neutrality
is transparently false, intended only for public relations against theists making
statements about science. It is never invoked against evolutionary naturalists
making statements about religion. For example, Gould recently wrote in Time
that "No scientific theory, including evolution, can pose any threat to religion"
because they belong to separate, nonoverlapping spheres. Yet the only way he
can separate the two so neatly is to deny that religion has any cognitive status.
Science deals with "the factual state" of the world, he writes, whereas religion
deals with "spiritual meaning and ethical values." Hence, when it comes to what
he considers the real world, Gould allows science to "overlap" religion
all the time. "Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us,"
he writes in Ever Since Darwin. "Biology took away our status as paragons
created in the image of God."

John Haught, a theistic
evolutionist and theologian at Georgetown University [see "Your
Darwin Is Too Small," CT, May 22, 2000, p. 52], suggests that Gould
is being duplicitous: If the "philosophical message" of evolution really is
that matter is all there is, as Gould insists, and that there is no purpose
to the universe, "then no conceivable theology, by anyoneís definition,
could ever live comfortably with evolution."

Precisely. Thatís
why, for every scientist who soothingly intones that evolution can coexist peacefully
with religion, there is another who openly proclaims its antitheistic implications.
In Darwinís Dangerous Idea, for example, Tufts University professor
Daniel Dennett praises Darwinism as a "universal acid" that destroys "just about
every traditional concept" of religion and morality.

Steven Weinberg told
the Freedom From Religion Foundation after the Kansas decision: "I personally
feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive to religious belief, and
Iím all for that." If science helps bring about the end of religion,
Weinberg concluded, "it would be the most important contribution science could
make."

A survey by Edward Larson
and Larry Witham (Scientific American, September 1999) reveals that more
than 90 percent of NAS members reject belief in a personal Godand, furthermore,
they think science itself compels that conclusion [see "Inherit
the Monkey Trial," CT, May 22, 2000, p. 50]. There is a glaring incongruity
when those same scientists reassure the public that science is neutral on the
God question. "This has been figured out, I can assure you, by the people in
Kansas," Johnson says. "They consider that the scientific elite is simply lying
through its teeth about this issue."

The people of Kansas
and elsewhere know very well that their children are being taught that they
are products of an undirected, material mechanismand that this has enormous
religious implications. A biology textbook used at the University of Kansas
states baldly that "biological phenomena, including those seemingly designed,
can be explained by purely material causes, rather than by divine creation."

A widely used high-school
textbook from Prentice Hall describes evolution as "random and undirected,"
working "without either plan or purpose." A textbook from Addison-Wesley claims
that "Darwin gave biology a sound scientific basis by attributing the diversity
of life to natural causes rather than supernatural creation." Public schools
are supposed to be neutral regarding religion, but these statements are clearly
antagonistic to all theistic religions.

Untangling these religious
implications is the key to teaching origins in public schools. The common assumption
is that the denial of design is science, but that the affirmation
of design is religious, and therefore cannot be taught in public schools. "But
how can this be?" asks Meyer. "Darwinism and design theory do not address two
different subjects. They represent two competing answers to the same question:
How did life arise and diversify on earth?" This mistaken asymmetry has been
used to justify a form of "viewpoint discrimination," Meyer argues, something
the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.

Teach the Controversy

Whether or not the verbal
attack on Anna Harvey had anything to do with the Kansas decision, it remains
a vivid example of the hostility Christian students often face in public schools.
The boardís decision may not have been idealeven sympathizers say schools
ought to teach more about macroevolution, not less; they ought to acquaint students
with the unsolved problems and contrary evidence facing the theory. Indeed,
board members agree. But given the threat of expensive lawsuits, they took the
only course that seemed open to them at the time.

The political question
is Who decides? Linda Holloway, chairwoman of the Kansas board, says
what bothered her was the attitude the state science committee seemed to exhibit:
"Give us your kids and get out of the way." The Gallup Poll has consistently
shown (most recently in August 1999) that only about 10 percent of Americans
believe life evolved strictly by chance and natural forces. Roughly 90 percent
of Americans believe that God created life either directly or by guiding a gradual
process. This large majority is beginning to suspect that Darwinism is less
about objective science than about maintaining cultural power.

Any group with authority
to tell a cultureís dominant creation story functions as a kind of priesthood,
defining what shall be deemed ultimate truth. In the late 19th-century conflict
over Darwinism, T.H. Huxley pursued a deliberate strategy of overthrowing the
clergy and ordaining scientists as societyís new priesthood.

Thatís why it
was crucial for himand remains crucial for his successorsto entrench naturalistic
evolution as scientific orthodoxy. The result is that while 19th-century science
has been superseded in other fields, biology remains locked in an outdated mechanistic
paradigm.

In The Boston Review,
James A. Shapiro of the University of Chicago says molecular biology reveals
a complexity in living things "more consistent with computer technology than
with the mechanical viewpoint which dominated when the neo-Darwinian modern
synthesis was formulated."

Living things are packed
with complex information analogous to the software in a computerprograms or
algorithms that direct the whole complicated mechanism. Where does that information
come from? Information exhibits specified complexity, which is produced neither
by law nor chance, but only by design.

The slogan of the ID
movement is "teach the controversy." A June 1999 Gallup Poll found that Americans
favor teaching creation along with evolution by a margin of 68ñ29 percent.
Similarly, in February, John Zogbyís American Values Poll revealed that
64 percent of adults believe creationism should be part of the public-school
curriculum.

And many students agree:
In a reader survey by Seventeen magazine, half said they wanted creation
taught alongside evolution. New resources for teaching design are rapidly becoming
available; among the most popular is the supplemental text Of Pandas and
People, published by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics. A just-released
cartoon book from InterVarsity Press, titled Whatís Darwin Got to
Do With It?, uses humor to clarify the issues.

Clearly, Anna Harvey
is not alone in wanting to expand the science curriculum. The question is when
the scientific establishment is going to allow students to learn the latest
data, wherever they may lead. How ironic that current events are taught in every
classexcept biology.

Nancy Pearcey is coauthor of How Now Shall We Live? (with
Charles Colson) and The Soul of
Science (with Charles Thaxton).

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